Care Delivery

Strengthening and Expanding Care Delivery Systems

California’s public health care systems are committed to continually strengthening and expanding their care delivery systems to provide timely, high quality, and equitable care.

As leaders in Medi-Cal transformation, this work has largely focused on ensuring that those individuals most in need have access to care. Currently, SNI’s care delivery efforts are focused on two main areas: ambulatory care and virtual care.

Photo Credit: County of Santa Clara Health System

Ambulatory Care

For decades, California’s public health care systems have strengthened their approaches to team-based care, empanelment, and population health management. However, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many aspects of ambulatory care with repeated surges, rapid expansion of virtual care, and unprecedented staffing shortages. As we emerge from the most severe stages of the pandemic, California’s public health care systems are starting to rebuild and reimagine their delivery systems by returning to the foundations of high-quality care in the context of these new challenges.  

To help members with this transition, SNI launched programming on how systems can adapt foundational ambulatory care structures, such as staffing ratios, scopes of practice, panels, and scheduling templates, in a COVID-endemic world. SNI is bringing members together to reflect and share lessons learned from COVID-19 and new approaches to delivering the “right care, in the right place, at the right time.”

Virtual Care

When the pandemic began, health care providers jumped into action to care for their COVID-19 patients, while also ensuring that all patients received ongoing access to care. To improve access to care and prevent the spread of COVID-19, public health care systems quickly and dramatically shifted from in-person clinic services to video and phone visits.

SNI offers technical assistance to help public health care systems advance their capabilities to deliver virtual care from workflows for virtual team-based care to patient engagement by improving access and reducing digital barriers to care. SNI continues to help public health care systems assess, develop, and improve upon their long-term organization-wide strategy for virtual care with a focus on leadership and governance, clinical operations, patient engagement, and health equity. 

As public health care systems reassess their ambulatory care strategies to better integrate virtual care, SNI continues to provide programming that brings systems together to share best practices, lessons learned, and resources through peer-learning.